About Jan De Cock

Jan De Cock borrows a film vocabulary in discussing his photography and installation works—particularly durée (passage of time) and mise-en-scène (staging for a camera), for describing the way his pieces frame and tell stories. De Cock commonly photographs landscapes and architecture, then displays the images as single frames of a larger sequence in conjunction with archival images, furniture, or architectural constructions made of plywood. As part of his interest in constructing historical narratives, he publishes artist’s books as indexes for his projects. De Cock’s compositions have a stripped-down quality that variously references Piet Mondrian’s paintings and Umberto Boccioni’s Futurist sculptures. “To me, Modernism is the most important period in art history,” he once said. “Dare I say that Post-Modernism did not exist?”